Finnish Animal Farm Caged and Chained
Pirkko Koski*
George Orwell’s Animal Farm at the Finnish National Theatre. Directed, dramatized and translated by Michael Baran. Music Juhani Nuorvala, Set and costume design Tarja Simone, Sound design Jani Peltola, Juhani Nuorvala and Turkka Inkilä. Masks designed by Petra Kuntsi. Premiere 15 January 2025.
George Orwell’s Animal Farm at the Finnish National Opera. Libretto by Alexander Raskatov and Ian Burton, Conductor Bassem Akiki, Director Damiano Michieletto; Revival director Meisje Barbara Hummel. Dramaturgy Luc Joosten, Set design Paolo Fantin, Costumes Klaus Bruns, Choreography Thomas Wilhelm. World premiere in Amsterdam 3 March 2023. Premiere at the Finnish National Opera 28 March 2025.
“Critical thinking skills honed by a civilising education are the most potent antidotes to anti-democratic forces,” wrote the Director of the Finnish National Theatre, Mika Myllyaho, when announcing the Theatre’s 2025 spring programming. The Finnish National Theatre fostered these civilising critical thinking skills on its various stages through multiple genres, with the dramatization of George Orwell’s masterpiece, Animal Farm, being a fitting example. This revolutionary satire, published in 1945, depicts farm animals rising to rebellion against their master, only to eventually fall victim to new oppressors who have risen from amongst the farmyard ranks.
In Orwell’s text, locating the political message in the animal characters is primarily carnivalesque, but in the Finnish National Theatre’s production, the carnival was brought into question, and the focus was instead turned on what was originally satirised, whilst still leveraging the central metamorphosis of the story. The topicality of revolutionary satire is exemplified by the staging of Animal Farm in modern operatic form at the Finnish National Opera in spring 2025. The same story was told, this time highlighting the carnival elements more visibly.
The productions differed from each other in many ways, but they were united in their desire to be faithful to the original text and place the story in our politically polarised times.
Citizens in Chains
In the Finnish National Theatre’s production of Animal Farm, the viewer was confronted by a row of chained figures up front. The actors aimed their dialogue directly at the audience in close proximity. The production hinged on creating a direct storytelling relationship with the viewer, and as hierarchies and norms were challenged, the line between man and beast was blurred. According to the play text, we were looking at animals, yet the actors were all wearing a similar uniform of prison-like sportswear, and only a small picture on their chests betrayed what animal they represented. In this production, a group of people performed to the viewer what in the original text was described as an animal revolt; the animals from the story were given human forms. The actors, partly through voicing their characters, told us the story of the rise of the intelligent and unscrupulous pigs.
Orwell’s text depicting the degenerative effects of power was originally born out of a need to describe Stalin’s Soviet Union, but at the end of the Finnish National Theatre production, the characters were also subjected to a shower descending from the ceiling, echoing how another dictator, Hitler, exterminated unwanted individuals. Beyond serialising dictatorship, the viewer was asked to make connections with our age. Despite there being few overt references to the present day, the allusions were powerfully felt.
Animal Farm was an impressive production thanks to Michael Baran’s dramatization and direction that created a cohesive whole. Individual components converged well and conveyed a consistent political message: music and scenography were tightly integrated into the rest of the piece, and the actors shone. The production showed how a dictator is born and how they build their power base on demagogy and lies. The naïve believed in their leader’s sincerity, but joining the chorus of credulous sheep did not save them, and resistance led to immediate destruction.
The opening night of the Finnish National Theatre production was in mid-January, with sold-out performances until the end of March 2025. Escalating world events had already deepened the play’s message during its spring run. We were reminded that a dictator does not necessarily need to rise to power through revolution, and that democracy can also betray its ideals, disappear, and become its opposite. Many dictators have become powerful without revolution.
The National Theatre production adds a twist: the animal was only evident in speech and subtle costume name tags. The production ended up turning the metamorphosis on its head: we see chained people, not animals. The Brechtian parable was constructed from a narrative entity built out of visual, auditory and stylistic choices that all worked towards a coherent message.
Depicting the Birth of Totalitarianism
Through the staging of Alexander Raskatov’s Animal Farm opera, the Finnish National Opera’s production faithfully conveyed the social satire of Orwell’s novel, though the selected scenes and themes differed from the National Theatre production. The same text had given birth to two very different productions.
The Finnish National Opera’s production was invariably centred around music. Critic Hannu-Ilari Lampila described its musical tone as a “carnevalistic parody.” Musical descriptors can be extended to the performance itself: the term “grotesque satire” could easily describe the entire production. It is also easy to agree with the National Opera’s own characterisation of the piece: shameless, wild and masterful.
When depicting the revolution and its degeneracy, the operatic version constrained itself to the fictitious on-stage world, preserving the allegorical nature of the original text. The details in the programme confirmed that the interpretation had been built on a historical background similar to its Orwellian original, including locating early Stalinist U.S.S.R counterparts to the play’s characters. Sham trials and poisonings have their equivalents in our world, but in the opera, they melted into stagecraft. The historical connection was at its most recognisable in the choir of young pioneers (which reminded me of the dance of the small swans in Swan Lake). The rising tide of evil, its increased potency, was made tangible through the slow removal of animal masks.
The production was a shining example of how the operatic genre can have a powerful impact on human minds, yet the opera distanced itself from contemporary national discourse surrounding world politics in Finland. A visually and physically rich interpretation, the production elicited other contemporary associations. During the revolutionary song played in the opening scene, forest animals were asked to join the choir and sing with animal figures locked into intersecting and stacked cages: powerful visual choices for a first scene that effectively drew attention to the debate on animal rights.
Art as a Mirror to the World
Theatre—and the arts in general—has the power and the ability through its own mode of expression to take a stance on issues it deems relevant, regardless of practical politics. Evidently, producers at the Theatre and the Opera wanted to react to our current political moment, and the same impulse partly explained their productions’ audience success. By comparing the two productions, we can see how varied the scope of influence can be.
Orwell’s novel sets out a series of events bounded by time: a story of how a revolution betrays its participants. When analysing productions that stay faithful to the original Orwellian text, this narrative is preordained, yet contemporary allusions can be constructed in a multitude of ways. The differing ways in which these two productions tackled contemporaneity can be summarised by their strikingly different opening scenes: the chains of the Theatre and the cages of the Opera. The Opera showed how the animals finally escaped from their cages, and despite not achieving permanent freedom, life continued. In the theatrical interpretation, tied-up performers acted as both storytellers and witnesses, and the result was complete annihilation. I interpreted this as a warning: this cycle can be repeated.
The original text is political and was born out of a need to criticise the Soviet totalitarianism that developed out of its socialism. The threat to democracy was central to these two Finnish productions, though the threat manifested differently in the Theatre and the Opera. The two productions reacted to the contemporary moment by reinforcing the belief that the threat to democracy had been witnessed and that resistance is a collective issue.
*Pirkko Koski is professor emerita of theatre research from Helsinki University in Finland. She has written and edited several articles and books for the domestic and international market.Her most recent work includes monograph Suomen Kansallisteatteri ristipaineissa (“The National Theatre of Finland meeting pressure conflicts”, 2019), monograph Näyttelijänä Suomessa (“Being an actor in Finland”, 2013) and Finland’s National Theatre 1974-1991. The Two Decades of Generational Contests, Cultural Upheavals and International Cold War Politics (2022).
Copyright © 2025 Pirkko Koski
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #31, June 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
